I've been trying to figure this one out for days now...

I have a little Asus laptop with an i5 and 6GB RAM running Win8 64-bit
I think I've turned off most things and have power options disabled while on wall power...

I'm using a Presonus Audiobox 2x2 via USB and running ASIO at 256... The on-board Realtek is disabled.
Running X2 for a few reasons instead of X3 here...

All works fine, but if I leave it in record it will crash the computer (total shutdown) somewhere near 15 minutes of recording.

I've gone thru many settings and tried varying the record buffer size as well as disabled many services and other things running in the background...

I don't know what to try next... I would truly appreciate any thoughts or ideas...

I hope today is a simple 12 tones of a cakewalk for you!

Keni

Make sure you have no power saving features on. 

+1, could be a "green" drive installed. Make sure to use a power management setup with no sleep, snooze or snore options selected.

Thanks...
 
My thought as well, but I made sure it's plugged in and the power settings for such are Never for all three items... Dim, monitor sleep, and is the third system sleep? They are all set a Never...
 
Is there another place specific to the hard drive itself? Maybe in Administrator|Computer Management?
 
I'm gonna go look there now...
 
Thanks again...
Keni
 

I'm thinking of turning off write caching on the drive? Might that help?
Same for allowing the drive to be indexed...? Do you think I should disable both/either?

Thanks...
Keni

There is a USB Selective Suspend function of Windows that can be turned on or off in the Advanced Power Management Settings.
 
Please note that different versions of Windows may have different wording or be slightly different, but the function does the same thing.  The following is drawn from a computer with Windows 8:
 
1.  Go to Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Power Options\Edit Plan Settings
2.  Select High Performance under Preferred Plans
2.  Click on 'Change Advanced Power Settings' (opens Power Options dialog)
3.  Expand USB Settings > USB Selective Suspend Settings
5.  Set it to 'Disabled'
6.  Click on 'Apply'
 
Work your way back out of the screens (OK, etc)
 
The above tells Windows NOT to ever disable connected USB devices - Sonar gets a bit goofy when devices go away sometimes.
 
Hopefully, the above will help your situation.  
 
Bob Bone

Also, what is the exact model of hard drive?  We can look up its specs to see if it is a 'green' drive.
 
Bob Bone
 
 

Yeah, unfortunately certain hardrives have little "features" built into them that put the drives to sleep. They can be tricky to get at. Gawd... I can't remember the utility Western Digital uses.
 
I think the place to look for this kind of crap is in the Device Manager, navigate to the hard disk entries and poke around the Properties of the installed drives.
 
Unfortunately (and don't quote me on this) the so called "Green" drives may have these power features built right into the firmware and I don't know if they are accessible. Maybe just try to move the mouse around or something every few minutes to keep things from falling asleep if that is the case.
 
Also on my (Acer) laptop I did a clean install of windows and my hard drive and encountered a familiar problem I had solve previously (after I had done a massive cleanup/disabling of what I thought was bloatware).
 
Many laptops and I'm assuming prebuilt/preconfigd computers will have a hardware management utility installed that makes everything work efficiently. It responds to windows control panel settings or sometimes a GUI for the utility itself.
 
If you disable that power management thingie or uninstall it it can make your hard drives start snoozing. In my case the laptop would start making an annoying click as the heads reset because I had disabled the AcerPowerManagement utility (the first time this happened) or the utility simply wasn't present because of the clean install.
 
In the first case unblocking it fixed the issue (there was some other weirdness going on in regards to the actual provider of the utility going out of business or something so I think Microsoft themselves had to put out a patch) and in the secon ( the clean install) I simply had to download and install the utility from the Acer site then update Windows.
 
Then I just had to make sure in the Windows Power Management settings that the hardrives were set to NEVER go to sleep. This I believe can be achieved by simply setting the Power Management thingie to "Performance" but I prefer to go in and create a custom plan just to be sure.
 
I hope that helps and isn't too confusing/weird.
 
Also... howdy, Kenny. Gald to see you're still rocking' it. ;-)

Thanks for reminding me, Beepster - Keni I forgot to give you a big 'howdy' in my earlier posts  - Howdy - good to see you out there.
 
Bob Bone
 

Might have found the problem...

I saw that the driver was dated 2012 and got suspicious... ;-)

I just installed the current driver (2.21) dated 2014 and I'm now approaching 23 minutes uninterrupted recording without a crash. The best I had previously was a little over 15 so it's better if not perfect. We'll see... If it makes 30 minutes I should be fine...

Sometimes it's the little things? ;-)

Thanks again...
Keni